# Captain Patterson Sights Nanumea (1809)

URL: https://allhistories.com/tuvalu/timeline/1809-captain-patterson-sights-nanumea
Location: Nanumea, Tuvalu
Themes: main-event

In 1809 Captain Patterson, commanding the brig Elizabeth on a trading voyage from Port Jackson to China, sighted Nanumea. Wikipedia's articles on Nanumea and Tuvalu both record the sighting, with no month or day given, and neither article describes any landing, trade or meeting with the islanders of that time. The voyage reflects the growth of trade between the new British colony at Port Jackson and Asian ports. Ships on that run crossed the central Pacific and sometimes noted atolls on the way. Nanumea had been charted by Mourelle in 1781, so Patterson's sighting is a record of the island being seen again, not discovered. The Wikipedia chronology moves from this sighting directly to the 1819 voyage of Arent de Peyster, which gave the Ellice name to Funafuti. For contact and population before the 1820s the surviving evidence is thin, and later estimates for Nanumea, of 500 to 650 people between 1860 and 1900, are the earliest numbers recorded. At this point in the timeline (1809), no single ruler governed the islands (c. 1000 BCE – 1892); Polynesian settlers and their descendants lived in independent island communities under their own chiefs and councils, and no list of rulers survives.

## Why it matters
It shows how little outsiders knew of Tuvalu before the 1820s, and that the islands appeared on the edge of the trade routes linking Sydney and China.

Ruler at the Time: [Prehistory, Polynesian settlement and the independent island communities](https://allhistories.com/tuvalu/rulers/prehistory-polynesian-settlement-and-the-independent-island-communities-1)

## Sources
- [Wikipedia — Nanumea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanumea)
- [Wikipedia — Tuvalu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvalu)